Readers are beginning to have questions and comments about the novel...

I should have done this a long time ago but today I created an author page on Book Bub under Michael T Shay. The road to writing and editing a book ends with a book that needs readers, surprisingly enough. I thought my blog and in-person marketing would be sufficient. But it's not. While I get the new site up and running, please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments about "Zeppelins Over Denver" here. I can answer your questions on this public forum or via e-mail or by letter. Please ask me to respond via letter! I am a lifelong writer of letters and receive so few these days. Many circulars about metal roofs and new-car sales and restaurant openings. But few letters. Thrill me!

Via Audible, I spend a year in an Irish garden

On my June 1 post, I talked about buying on Audible "In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden." I mentioned that I don't listen to many audiobooks as my vision remains fine and I love reading. There's a little message inside my head that says: "Audiobooks are for endless drives across Wyoming." During my 25 years at the Wyoming Arts Council, I made many drives across the 98,000-square mile state and listened to cassettes, disks, and, briefly, on one overlooked Spotify intro subscription in a state auto. 

So many great memories of Janet Evanovich (perfect to distract a keyed-up driver on I-80 winter drives), a dozen Wyoming-based mysteries by C.J. Box and Craig Johnson, an odd Chuck Palahniuk novel on the way to Sheridan (weird scene in a swimming pool), and one perfect summer drive to Jackson with geological landmarks discussed in John McPhee's "Rising from the Plains." Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos" got me all the way from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City. 

So here I am, taking a break from the printed page and listening to the wonderful voices of Niall Williams and Christine Breen on Audible. Twelve months in an Irish garden. I am transfixed. My Irish roots and life-long gardening interests are both addressed. In "March," an Irish priest dropped by the narrators' little patch of land in County Clare, and conducted mass in the garden. Neither Niall or Chris are active Catholics (more the fallen-away variety) but both agree and it's glorious. 

But there was something about it.

Quote from Chapter 4, April

"The moment of spring sets everything within me tremoring."

I've felt it in Wyoming. 

March is filled with wind-whipped snowstorms. April's beginning can be much the same. But there is a day when I step out to sun and calm. I look at the garden. A few bulb plants bloom. It's still six weeks before I put seedlings in the ground. 

But it's the light of those early April days that transform me. Every day the light stretches out to those long summer days. On June 21, the western sky is still lit at 10. I love and fear that day as days start to get shorter until it's dark at 4:30 in late November, even at Halloween the kids gets started going door to door before 5.

I have felt the tremoring Williams describes. Here in Florida, it is calmed by the coming of heat and humidity. By June 6, the tremoring has given way to sweat and sunburn.

So what does a novel set in 1919 Colorado have to do with the Detroit of the 1960s?

My historical novel, Zeppelins Over Denver, was released in early May by The Ridgeway Press in Michigan, Detroit to be exact.

The novel, set in the Colorado of 1919, doesn’t have much to do with either Detroit or Michigan, but its life has a lot to do with a couple of determined Detroiters. It’s the press co-founded by M.L. Liebler, a poet and author whose resume is about five miles long. As he writes about in Hound Dog: A Poet’s Memoir or Rock, Revolution, and Redemption (Cornerstone Press), he’s a Detroit native, a resident of St. Clair Shores his entire life. He was there to experienced the rise of Motown and the Detroit rock scene that flourished in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.

He pursued an advanced degree with the vigor he brought to music and poetry. His title at Wayne State University is professor of English and Labor Studies, a one-two punch that shouts Detroit. It has been my good fortune to work with M.L. in the literary arts world, mostly through the YMCA Writers Voice Project. It was launched from New York’s West Side Y (now at the the Central YMCA of New York) by the late Jason Shinder. It has been a facet of Y programming across the U.S., in places as far-flung as the Cheyenne Family YMCA in Cheyenne, Wyo., where my wife Christine supervised the program. Sadly, the Writer's Voice program Chris supervised vanished when the Cheyenne Y closed last year. A sad day on the lone prairie.

As coordinator of the literary program at the Wyoming Arts Council, I enlisted M.L. as a judge for our literary fellowships and had the pleasure of driving him across that vast state and introducing him to The Legend of the Jackalope as well as a batch of very fine poets and writers. M.L took me on when I was failing to find a publisher. I will be eternally grateful to him for that. He was ably assisted by WSU student and editor/designer Brandon Wade. I will have more to say about this as time passes and I look for ways to lift up this blog.

Meanwhile, excuse me while I figure out intriguing ways to promote a book published by one of America's stalwart small presses. It was launched by the Ridgeway Press and Artist Collection 52 years ago. Its roots are deep in the Detroit alternative arts scene. Here's a description taken from Detroit's Book Beat:

Ridgeway Press & Collective is one of Detroit’s vital independent literary-artistic forces. With weekly online meetings, shared vacations, and a screwball newsletter, this band of creatives has remained together, loyal to the call of Ridgeway Dada. 

There is happiness aplenty (and sorrow) in This Is Happiness

This is happiness.

This is happiness.

This is happiness.

So says Christy, one of the characters in Niall Williams’ novel, “This Is Happiness.” Christy rides his bicycle with our protagonist and narrator Noel (Noe) Crowe in Faha in County Clare, Ireland. It’s the spring of 1958. Christy is an electric man, sent to the village to sign up people for “the electric,” the miracle of electricity finally coming to rural Ireland. It takes a while for Williams to reveal the man’s true purpose, to apologize to a local widow, Annie Mooney, for leaving her at the altar 50 years before. Christy finds shelter with Noe and his grandparents, Doady and Ganga.

Noe, 17, learns of the man’s mission and vows to help and therein lies the heartache and happiness of the tale. Noe fled to his grandparents’ house after his mother died, he quit the seminary and found himself at loose ends with his father in Dublin. For Noe: “All that had stitched me into this life came undone and I couldn’t escape the feeling that folded against my back were wings that had failed to open.” I don’t know of a better description of being 17 in Dublin or Faha or Daytona Beach, Florida. Anywhere.

This is my first Williams’ novel and I was entranced by its first lines, “It had stopped raining.” The reader finds that Faha is a soggy, boggy place, not accustomed to sunny days that stretch on forever and make life intriguing. It stops raining the Wednesday of Holy Week and the sun stays, as if the Good Lord himself willed it on the most sacred time of the Catholic year.

The writer’s style is beguiling, filled with his Irish voice and there is no stopping the reading once you’ve begun. You even begin speaking like the characters after awhile. You’re hooked. The ending can’t be predicted. You’re along for a joyful, sometimes heart-rending, ride.

Ann Patchett promoted the novel on one of her “New Book Friday” sessions from Parnassus Books in Nashville. I love her books so anything she suggests gets my attention. I am Irish-American, my grandfather came as a lad from County Roscommon with his own sad story that took him all the way to his 90^th birthday. He was a serious man yet kind, the man who always brought ice cream to our house. When I lost my college scholarship, he sent me a 20-dollar bill every month. That was happiness!

There is an Irish voice in literature. You know it when you hear it. Filled with words and humor and sadness. You could say that about writers from other traditions. Jewish writers, for instance, know a bit about dark humor. But literature has a strong Irish voice and that’s what you hear in Williams. He  lives with his wife Christine Breen and their pets in a renovated cottage in west Clare abandoned in 1910 when Chris's grandfather left for the U.S. 

This Is happiness. Keep saying it while pedaling your beat-up bicycle through the heather in County Clare or wherever you may be.

This Is Happiness.

Postscript: Checking out Williams' web site, I entered his world and his wife's. Listening to a snippet of their book, "In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden," I decided to buy the audiobook. I don't listen to many audiobooks but this one combines the voices of the writers with gardening and a view of rural Ireland in 2021. How could I resist?

A breakthrough by any other name

Shawn Rossiter wrote a review in 15 Bytes magazine of The Nomad Literary Magazine’s new "Breakthroughs" issue. During our Zoom "flash-reading" on May 19, editor Rachel White noted that the review was accurate but not entirely complimentary. Here's how it opens:

THE NOMAD’s Issue 4, “Breakthroughs,” is more about the through than the break. There are few explosive moments, not many trumpet blasts. Instead, the issue gathers fiction, memoir, lyric essay, prose poem, and poetry—fifty-four pieces by twenty-seven writers—around breakthrough as passage, as a moving through.

15 Bytes is a publication of the Artists of Utah in Salt Lake City. The Nomad is based in Bountiful, Utah. Rossiter goes on to describe some of the stand-out Nomad pieces. Rossiter had praise for Shari Zollinger's piece which she read at the May 19 event:

Shari Zollinger’s “Found” gives the issue one of its purest formal breakthroughs. The essay enters “psychedelic space” through a microdose on the morning of an eclipse—Alice falling through, the red pill and blue pill hovering at the edges—and searches backward along memory’s “thread-gauzy timeline” for a self left waiting in a Taipei hospital. The strangeness of the piece, its Alice-and-Matrix layering, its eclipse-as-wormhole logic, enacts a consciousness genuinely working at the borders of what language can hold. What is found is not restored intact. Instead, the abandoned self is allowed to burn, scatter, and become movable. “It was okay to let a piece of me die,” Zollinger writes. “It was okay to blow away.” Her author’s note makes the connection explicit: the piece itself emerged from a breakthrough into the lyric essay, “at the crossroads between breakdown and breakthrough.” Form and subject meet as the essay’s fragmented, luminous movement enacts the kind of healing it describes.

That's the key to Rossiter's interest and I thank him for the attention. As a retired arts administrator, I respect anyone's desire to be part of an arts non-profit. It is a constant struggle. Funding comes from a State Arts Agency (SAA) or Local Arts Agency (LAA), sometimes a Regional Arts Organization (RAO), which is Creative West in Denver. Also memberships and subscriptions and any local funding the org can muster. 

The National Endowment for the Arts is in there, either through one of these agencies or directly, with applications to the NEA. For those of us paying attention, all of these entities have been under the gun since Jan. 20, 2025. Funding is tight. Some private foundations have stepped in to relieve shortfalls.

All of this is important. I may not have the exact lay of the land because I've been retired from day-to-day arts-funding functions for 10 years as I wrote and published a historical novel. I also still submit to lit mags via Submittable or directly to places where I know editors, such as The Nomad. Thanks Rachel and her business partner, the traveling poet/musician Ken Waldman, now somewhere in Texas. 

The poets and writers on our May 19 Zoom gathering all have interesting stories to tell. Their ages and backgrounds are revealed on the Nomad web site, and their stories are their own to tell. The challenge is to make it interesting for the reader. In a way, every poem and story is a breakthrough for the author. Every literary magazine is a breakthrough into imagination. 

THE NOMAD Literary Magazine takes a trip from Bountiful to Zoom tonight

Two of my short stories are included in "The Breakthroughs" issue of The Nomad Literary Magazine based in Bountiful, Utah. I've been submitting work to The Nomad since its first issue which became a print book. The project was launched by traveling writer/musician Ken Waldman (I just spoke to him -- he was traveling near Terlingua, Texas, which he said was remote and pretty cool) and Utah-based writer Rachel White. Rachel does most of the editing work as Ken travels coast-to-coast. Ken was a frequent visitor to Wyoming and he always stopped to see me in Cheyenne when I was the literature coordinator at the Wyoming Arts Council. While a trip to Bountiful was just a short jaunt across the Rockies from Cheyenne, I relocated to the edge of the Florida wetlands and couldn't be farther away from my old stomping grounds of WY/CO/UT. It's a good thing we'll be releasing the issue and reading our work on Zoom tonight at 7 p.m. MDT, 9 p.m. EDT. Free. FMI: THE-NOMAD.eventbrite.com

Want a signed copy of "Zeppelins Over Denver?"

Title: Zeppelins Over Denver

Author: Michael T. Shay

ISBN: 9781564390905

Price: $30 list, $35.22, signed and mailed

Print length: 426 pages

Format: Paperback

Publishing date: May 5, 2026 by The Ridgeway Press of Michigan

How to order: Venmo $35.22 (book plus USPS Media Mail shipping) to Hummingbird Minds Press on Venmo (307-241-2903); put address and name for signing in notes. It also is available on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore. My new favorite is Novel Tea Books in Ormond Beach, a place with comfy chairs and a distinctive selection of teas and munches. It is accessible for those of us in walkers, rollators, and e-scooters. I suggest using a rollator for the ramp in the back and for the quaint spaces inside. There's also a cool front porch with only two steps that can be managed easily.

BTW, when Ingram Spark was uncertain about pub date, I did a test order with Ann Patchett's Parnassus Books in Nashville (I'm reading one of her "Friday Favorites" now) and Books & Books in Miami, originator of the fantastic Miami Book Fair. It took about ten days but books arrived safely. 

Zeppelins Over Denver is a historical novel set in 1919 Colorado 

July 1919. Irish immigrant Patrick Hott and U.S. Army nurse Frannie Lee meet on a train going west through Colorado. He's a lung patient headed for the West's healing climate and she's off to an assignment at a new army hospital outside Denver. As they strike up a conversation, neither realizes that the train is hours away from a disaster that will upend their lives and bring them together to face new dangers as America tries to forget The Great War and race into the "Roaring Twenties." Inspired by his maternal grandmother's war diary and years of research, Shay gives readers a new look at Colorado's post-war boom that also saw the rise of the KKK, a "Red Scare" prompted by fear of Bolsheviks, and labor strife fueled by the infamous Ludlow Massacre

 Michael Shay’s work has appeared in High Plains Literary Review, Nomad, Colorado Review, Owen Wister Review, Poetry Hotel, Flash Fiction Review, WyoFile, Silver Birch Press, Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams from Coffee House Press, and Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers. He was co-editor of the Pronghorn Press anthology Deep West: A Literary Tour of Wyoming. He’s a graduate of Father Lopez High School, Daytona State College, and University of Florida. He earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University. Michael worked as an arts administrator for 25 years, promoting the literary arts for the Wyoming Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. He and his family live in Ormond Beach, Fla.

Contact: michaelshaywyo@gmail.com; hummingbirdsminds.blogspot.com; Michael Shay on Facebook